If you ask Matt Jackson who the best wrestler in the world is right now, only one name comes to mind: Will Ospreay.
Jackson recalls knowing for a long time that current AEW International Champion Ospreay would eventually become the best in his books and nowadays feels like he has arrived at that status.
Ahead of a world tag title match on Wednesday evening at AEW Grand Slam against Ospreay and Kyle Fletcher, Jackson opened up about the Briton’s evolution as a wrestler in an interview with Justin Barrasso of Undisputed.
“When we first met Will many years ago, we called him a wrestling prodigy,” he told Undisputed. “He was young and inexperienced but so far ahead of everybody else. And it all came so easy to him. We’d whisper to each other about how he was probably going to end up being the best wrestler in the world one day, but how we couldn’t let him know that because we didn’t want that to go to a young man’s developing brain. We didn’t want to feed his ego [laughs]. Now, all these years later, and he’s clearly the best in-ring wrestler on the planet. And I’m not sure it’s even close.”
Jackson also gave credit to Ospreay’s tag partner, Fletcher, and the growth he has shown since joining AEW in 2023.
“Fletcher is fantastic,” he said. “He is one to watch. He’s picked up the TV wrestling style so quickly and effortlessly. Wrestling him is intimidating in the same way it was when we first met and worked with a young, sharp Adam Cole or Kyle O’Reilly type. Like that feeling of, ‘We better have our working boots on tonight or this kid is going to lap us out there.’ So, it definitely keeps us on our toes and makes us stay young.”
The full interview, including a retrospective on the first-ever All In show and how it was a “gathering and celebration for all of us misfit wrestlers,” can be read here.
